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Rising youth homelessness a crisis we mustn't ignore

A new survey confirms that youth homelessness is on the rise. It's a complex problem that requires a concerted solution.

The number of young Canadians on the streets is growing. And the longer they are on the streets, the more likely they are to die, writes Sean Kidd. (Dreamstime)

By Sean Kidd

Mon., May 12, 2014

If you wanted to find me in the summer of 2000, I was most likely at a service for street youth — like the now-shuttered Street Outreach Services (SOS) and Youthlink Innercity in Toronto, or Covenant House in Vancouver. I was doing research on street youth suicide for my PhD.

During that summer, I met a young woman who was only 18, but had already been working in the sex trade for years. She was tack sharp.

Through the skilful persistence of the staff at SOS, and her own tough mindedness, she had left the sex trade, crack addiction and had a job and boyfriend who wasn’t involved in the streets. She was able to imagine a different life for herself. She was tough, funny and made light of a past that was nothing but violence and disappointment — at the hands of parents, through holes in the various so-called safety nets, until she hit the streets and entered a new landscape of violence and exploitation. I had interviewed her as a research participant, learned a lot about her life and hung with her and others in the SOS waiting area cracking jokes and talking nonsense for hours.

Then came a moment I will never forget. I was sitting in the staff area chatting with the employment counsellor when one of the outreach staff came in and told us that this girl who had dug herself out of hell had died of a drug overdose in the bathtub of a crack house.

It is something that has never left me — it cut through all of the rhetoric about homeless youth and somehow made it very personal and impossible to accept.

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Meanwhile, well over a decade later, we continue to collect statistics. Eva's Initiatives, an organization dedicated to confronting youth homelessness, just released the findings of a national survey of over 1,000 Canadian homeless youth. These young people are among the 30,000 to 60,000 youth on Canadian streets on any given day. The survey builds upon the rafts of data documenting the adversity that leads to homelessness, violence on the streets and the tremendous difficulty leaving that life. Young people have to swim against the current to move from poverty and marginalization to housing and a good quality of life.

Very much in line with research showing that suicide and overdose are the leading causes of death for homeless youth in Canada, this latest survey found that 56 per cent of the youth who responded had major mental health issues. When coupled with addictions, this represents a major challenge when it comes to finding housing for homeless youth — a challenge not adequately addressed in our current system of services.

The complexity of youth homelessness makes it difficult to find solutions. Mental illness is an important piece in the puzzle, but it’s not the whole story. Abusive and neglectful parents are sometimes a cause, but not always. Family poverty is often involved, but this is not true for all. Failed school, child protection, and criminal justice systems are often part of the problem, but again not always.

There is one clear and incontrovertible truth, however — the number of young Canadians on the streets is growing. And the longer they are on the streets, the more likely they are to die, be victimized, become mentally ill and addicted, and the more difficult they are to engage in services.

The solution involves better attention to mental health in schools, child protection services, and the criminal justice system — the places through which at-risk youth flow. We need greatly enhanced support for the many community organizations providing youth services on the thinnest of financial margins, and we need system-wide solutions that better address health, housing and employment.

Governments need to do more: youth services are left with patching together motley collections of grants and donations, with staff often unsure from one year to the next if they will have a job. We need a strategy — one that will involve a modest investment relative to the high costs of prisons and hospitals, not to mention the social costs of failing to invest — and the human rights implications.

Youth homelessness has always been a barometer of social and civic health. From the height of 1800s industrialization, to the great depression, to our current statistics, which rival those of earlier times, this is an issue that warns of high levels of poverty, social inequity, and inadequate social response. Let’s stop losing our kids to the streets.

Dr. Sean Kidd is Head of the Psychology Service of CAMH Schizophrenia Services and Assistant Professor with the University of Toronto Department of Psychiatry.

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